Join the capital’s new green party
WE’VE ALL FOUND OUR GARDENING MOJO
EVERYONE discovered they were gardeners this year. Just as quickly, everyone discovered they couldn’t tell a garden fork from a hosepipe. “I am a constant gardener,” I thought, surveying my little patch of Peckham in April with satisfaction and gently peeling a slug from the echinacea. Two months later my confidence had gone the way of my echinacea and wilted.
Gardening was listed as the second most popular lockdown activity people planned to do after watching TV, according to a survey by GlobalData in May, ahead of cooking, reading and exercising. The gardening app Candide saw an average increase in new members of 60 per cent during lockdown compared with the same period of last year. Months of lockdown idleness (or just a desperate need to escape a WFH desk) made landscape architects of us all. Bulbs were bulk ordered. Gardeners’ World was watched. Royal Horticultural Society subscriptions were gifted.
But let’s face it, we need expert guidance. “People keep fiddling with their irrigation systems and then thinking they’ve broken them,” laughs Nick Learoyd, 27, a garden consultant for whom business has boomed during lockdown. “I had to travel a 45-minute cycle journey to Kensal Rise just to plug in a battery.” That’s the gardener’s equivalent of a callout to IT to find that you simply needed to turn the computer off and on. But amateur errors are rife. “Deadhead
ing is probably the massive one people forget,” says George Brooke, founder of landscape consultants The Outsiders. “If you take the dead heads off, the plant keeps thinking it needs to keep reproducing. Ergo, if you keep nipping flowers off it will keep flowering.”
The raison d’etre of the lockdown gardener is varied.
Some wanted to grow vegetables, perhaps more in hope than expectation that they’d be able to live off the land and avoid the supermarket scrum. “At the moment the things to plant are salad leaves, chard, spring onions and purple broccoli,” says Amanda Brame, head of horticulture at Petersham Nurseries. “If you sow now you’ll get a harvest of lettuce and chard almost immediately, but others will sit as hardy winter plants to get a harvest from in March.”
Others simply wanted to take time to slow down, step away from the screen and create something aesthetic from scratch. “Cyclamen, winter pansies, heathers, hellebores are good right now, while ferns are great — the other thing that’s looking good now is grasses, which are all starting to flower,” says Peter Milne, co-founder of The Nunhead Gardener, which this week opened a second site in Camberwell. Peace of mind is a natural side-effect of gardening — a boon in stressful times. The gardening charity Thrive found that 43 per cent of people agreed that gardening helped their mental health. A lonely
nation is crying out for help in flexing our green fingers. An Englishman’s home may be his garden, but that didn’t stop the majority of us feeling totally clueless as we stepped into our tiny little Eden projects. And look, most of us don’t have an actual garden. We were stuffing pot plants onto balconies. We were cramming hardy erigeron daisies into front patios. Personal trainers — of the garden variety — have sprouted to fill the gap. Take Nick Cutsumpas, 28, Gwyneth Paltrow’s green-fingered guru of choice and a fulltime “plant coach”. The dashing New Yorker dishes out advice on the upkeep of indoor ZZ plants, golden pothos and philodendron to the internet (not heard of these plants? You need the guru). He offers advice like: Create Your “Greenprint” (“You don’t choose the plants, they choose you.) But for those who prefer their advice a little earthier, take a look at our guide.
Ferns are good now, according to The Nunhead Gardener, which has just expanded